Two years after they exploded into the charts with their classical-infused pop, Clean Bandit are one member down and known for soundtracking an M&S advert. As they release a new single with Sean Paul, Alice Vincent finds out how they've weathered the storm.

When classical-pop quintet Clean Bandit graduated from Cambridge they had the kind of job offers thousands of young people might do unspeakable things for. Violinist Milan Neil Amin-Smith, who got the highest mark in his year upon completing a masters in economics, was approached by both MI6 and the Foreign Office.

Songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jack Patterson put his architecture degree on hold to study at Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, the oldest film school in the world, and was on the brink of taking a job at the St Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts – possibly to the disappointment of a tutor who compared his efforts in the second year to One World Trade Center architect Daniel Libeskind.

With an education from Westminster, years of study in Russia and a degree in Russian literature, language and history, trilingual Grace Chatto had a perfect CV. As for the fourth member, Luke Patterson – he was still in school.

And yet, despite having more degrees and languages than band members, Clean Bandit decided to turn down these opportunities because they had one ambition: to get their home-made music videos on MTV.

Clean Bandit in 2014Credit:
Ken McKay/ITV/REX Shutterstock

"We were obsessed with music videos," Patterson says. "It was the music videos that were the primary driver for everything."

"We knew we wanted our videos on MTV so we were striving towards that for a good two years after graduating and a few years before that," explains Chatto.

Clean Bandit started out as a string quartet formed at Cambridge by Chatto and Amin-Smith, who had met at Westminster before playing together in Haringay Youth Musicians. The band was born after Jack Patterson, who went on to have a relationship with Chatto, started to add electronic and reggae beats to their classical music. His brother Luke, then 14, was brought in on drums.

If someone’s got a problem with you being posh they’re not going to be able to hold you back with anythingJack Patterson

They may have been able to tell Shostakovich from Chopin, but a university career spent wielding bows had ill-equipped Clean Bandit for the rigours of the music industry – despite the hours they put in: “Jack built a bed out of scaffolding and there was studio equipment underneath,” Chatto says of the band’s early days, when she and Patterson were a couple. “We’d be in there all day making music and then we’d fall asleep and then we’d wake up and do the same thing. That went on for three years.”

“We had 10 finished songs that were going down really well live, but we never recorded them because we were so obsessed with making videos.”

Meanwhile, Chatto was relentlessly cold-calling broadcasters, pleading with them to play their music. They got their break a year after leaving university, when a slew of music industry executives contacted the band overnight having heard their song Mozart’s House play on Radio One. Although staunchly middle-class pop groups, such as Mumford & Sons and Keane, can have a rough ride in the industry, Patterson claims their high-brow backgrounds haven't held them back: "I don’t know if there have been opportunities that we’ve missed because people have thought we are posh. I doubt it. If someone’s got a problem with you being posh they’re not going to be able to hold you back with anything."

But what cemented their success was Rather Be, which exploded onto the airwaves in 2014. A perfect mash-up of classical string lines and electronic house euphoria, it managed to make 15,000 people lift their hands in the air at the sound of a man playing a violin solo during Clean Bandit’s debut performance at Glastonbury and went on to win a Grammy and two Ivor Novello Awards while still enjoying a 73-week run in the charts.

Such was its success that Rather Be began to spell what could have become Clean Bandit’s downfall: the song is now best known for soundtracking the drool-inducing footage of freshly prepared food for Marks & Spencer.

“My old headmaster tells pupils that ‘Jack Patterson, who did the Marks and Spencer music’ went to the school”, Patterson jokes. Similarly, Chatto’s friends “say that it’s really taken over. They they think of it as the M&S song now”.

Chatto’s reaction is sweetly unabashed: “I just find it so beautiful, the way the food is chopped! I really enjoy it”.

Clean Bandit’s commercial deals haven’t always been so inoffensive. A month after Rather Be won a Grammy the band became the faces of Cortana, Nokia’s answer to Apple’s Siri, the personal assistant software available on smartphones. The song played as the group asked Cortana to set reminders such as “remind Neil not to dress like it’s 1996”.

Even when we signed the deal Neil said he only wanted to do two or three albums, I think he just wanted to do other stuff.Jack Patterson

It was a disaster. Broadsheet headlines gleefully trilled, “watch Clean Bandit’s career die before your eyes”. Twitter was awash with scorn for the group’s forced laughter with a robot. YouTubers dedicated hours to making parody versions that clocked thousands of views - mostly because the original was taken offline in the backlash.

“I’d do another Cortana advert, I don’t see why not”, Chatto says. “Really?” Patterson is as taken aback as me. “It was funny to see the reaction. A lot of people didn’t like that advert, but I know we had fun doing it. Being in adverts, it’s a tricky thing, I suppose.”

Clean Bandit in the Cortana advert, 2015

Amin-Smith, however, gave a far more damning verdict to student paper The Tab in 2015: “I don’t feel very comfortable about endorsing a massive corporation like that”. Cortana, perhaps, sparked the beginning of a rupture in the group: a few weeks ago, Amin-Smith told them and Luke that he was leaving the band. He didn’t record his string lines on their new single. Hours after Chatto, Patterson and I meet, he broke the news to his fans on Twitter.

“I had a suspicion that he wasn’t enjoying it”, Patterson explains. “Even when we signed the deal he said he only wanted to do two or three albums, I think he just wanted to do other stuff.”

Chatto and Amin-Smith have been friends since they went to Westminster School, reuniting as half of the Cambridge string quartet. She still seems in shock about his departure: “It’s kind of like one person leaving a family. It’s very strange.” Patterson has since “heard on the grapevine” that Amin-Smith has jumped into a job at a think tank.

The rest of the band have spent 2016 looking ahead and working on their new album – bar the six months Chatto spent under the tutelage of a cello professor in Florence.

Despite doom-mongering predictions, Clean Bandit’s career is yet to die in front of anyone’s eyes. If anything the giddy heights of 2014 have granted the group freedom. Rather than descend into the hedonism enjoyed by other artists who sell a million singles in six months, Clean Bandit decided to make a comeback single with the least popular X Factor winner yet. While Patterson had concerns when Simon Cowell called him up during a party and asked them to work with Louisa Johnson on Tears, Chatto was sold – she had been “totally blown away” while watching her on the series. They were right to trust their instinct: the song went platinum after being released in May.

They’ve potentially courted controversy again with Rockabye, their new single that was released on Friday with Anne-Marie, by making the first ever dancehall song about single motherhood with the man who brought the genre to the masses, Sean Paul - just weeks after the Jamaican musician slammed the likes of Drake and Justin Bieber for discrediting the genre. Patterson claims that Paul’s shout out to “all the single mums” “is on the side of genius, as opposed to really unacceptable.”

Clean Bandit have sailed stormier seas, however, and still appear to be bobbing along nicely. As Chatto says: “When something sounds good, I don’t think any of the connotations matter.”

Clean Bandit’s new single Rockabye is out now. They play a sold out show at London’s Roundhouse on Monday 24 October.